


come down; come around

by hardscrabble



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Eames (Inception), a little fighting a little cuddling, the first part was brutal this is mostly just soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 05:23:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20924858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardscrabble/pseuds/hardscrabble
Summary: Immediate sequel toearthbound; coming down.Post-Limbo fic.Memory as the breaking of a dam, continuously.





	come down; come around

**Author's Note:**

> First part ([here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20376721)) recommended but not required. Not linked as a series because I think they each can stand on their own.

He doesn’t even hear the gunshots; nevertheless, his ears are ringing when his eyes snap open. Eames is flat on the floor, just where he’d laid down a bloody lifetime ago. His actual vision is smeary, but crystal-clear images flash through his mind’s eye like a VHS tape fast-forwarding. Except that’s wrong, because there’s no continuity to them, no chronology. Like a bad slideshow, or a good surrealist film. City streets and syringes and handguns of a dozen makes and glasses filling with liquid and IV lines and flashes of streetlight off knife blades, brass knuckles. Faces and clothes and data, plane flights and car rides, tickets in dozens of names—

And a snatch of text, serif font, black on white, reproduced by a jittery photocopier: _Recall is instantaneous and complete upon waking from a Somnacin dream_.

The same holds for waking from Limbo, apparently.

But there’s so _much _of Limbo, and Eames nearly loses himself in it before he hears someone say, “Oh, thank God,” voice fervent but hushed. He gets an elbow under himself, but a small hand drops onto his sternum and presses, and a new cascade of old memories inundates him. They give whos and whats and wheres and whys, even as he’s floundering in recall. Everything he’s ever heard about Limbo is back in his head, swimming about like little fish in a tank.

There’s simply no way Ariadne could actually hold him down, but Eames accepts the signal and lies back, blinking furiously.

“We gotta move,” Ariadne goes on, speaking over Eames’s head to someone behind him—Arthur; that’s right, he’s behind Eames, sitting in a proper chair. “Ji texted. We got less than ten minutes.”

“As of?” Rustling behind him, rattling of the spools in the PASIV case. Which is on the table next to Arthur’s chair, which is a foot from the hotel room’s bed—

Ariadne’s answer is quick. “Just after you went under. Sixty seconds. Private sec.”

That’s a relief, Eames thinks with the detached part of himself actually keeping up with the present, the part of his mind that’s running basic functions while the rest of his consciousness overloads on raw memory. Law enforcement, he recalls, has a way of being _loudly_ inconvenient. A private team has to stay discreet, under the radar, the same way their prey does.

In Limbo, he hadn’t taken a mind crime job in decades, but here he is making mental checklists for pros and cons of his current one, and—

“_Why_ didn’t you just dream a bloody sniper rifle?” Eames demands, jerking himself upright—fuck Ariadne’s signal—and around to stare at Arthur.

At his side, Ariadne hisses, “Eames,” but Arthur is staring at him, face falling into that horrible skull-like emptiness. “_Eames_.” He ignores her, just glares at Arthur.

“I did,” Arthur says flatly. Last night, _last night_, he’d kissed Eames, and Eames had ripped himself away gasping, and now— “And I used it. Three times. We don’t have time for this.” He pushes himself up from the chair and lifts a briefcase from the floor next to the dresser.

“Fuck _off_ with _time_,” Eames spits, furious; in Limbo, Arthur was always a threat, and topside he’s one of the only men Eames trusts at his back, and then Arthur pushed him against a wall, and Eames is a little shocked but not at all surprised that what he most wants to do is punch Arthur square in the mouth. “What the fuck happened?”

Arthur glances over, but not at Eames; he’s looking at Ariadne. “How long?” he asks.

“Five minutes,” Ariadne answers immediately. “Eames, come on_. _We _don’t _have time. I know it’s hell—” Her voice breaks and she swallows hard. “But we have to _move_.”

Fuck; she’s been there, Eames remembers with a start, and that’s what makes him turn to face her. She looks a mess, hair gathered into a knot at the top of her head and sweat-darkened at the temples, sleeves of her shirt rolled past the elbow and the collar going crumpled. Her mouth is pressed into a thin line, brow furrowed.

His heart, he notes, is racing. “Fine,” he says, layering the single word with forbearance he doesn’t actually have. “Hello, Ariadne.” Which is stupid, on the one hand, because he’s only been asleep; on the other hand, it’s vital, because he’s only been re-aware of her _existence_ for the last ten minutes of his subjective timeline, which is still expanding like a Mandelbrot set inside his head—

Ariadne reaches for his wrist, her jaw clenching. “Tell me the date,” she orders, as she pulls the tape off his cannula; he lifts his hand to help and she swats at it, barking, “_Leave it_. Date. Day of the week.”

“First of September. Thursday.”

“How old is Yusuf?”

He blinks, something twisting in his gut. Yusuf is in Mombasa, on the edges of the expat communities, and while Eames hadn’t met him until his second stint in Kenya, how was he _ever_ fooled by a Mombasa that lacked him? “Thirty-seven this last April,” he answers, and hears the words shake.

“Location?”

“Philadelphia, outskirts. Hilton.”

Ariadne nods and grabs the film cannister that’s serving as their sharps-and-biowaste container. “How did you get here?” she asks.

Clever, thinks the part of him that isn’t panicking. And it is panic, he may as well admit— “Flew into Trenton yesterday and you picked me up in that rental.”

“Specifics,” she says, sounding terribly like Arthur. Arthur himself has been moving around the room, rubbing down surfaces with isopropanol and stuffing supplies into a garbage bag. Standard.

“From O’Hare. Car’s a grey Pontiac—a, what, Grand something.”

She nods again, and some of the tension melts out of her expression. “Okay. You pass. Welcome back, asshole.” Ariadne gets to her feet. “Arthur?”

“Done,” says Arthur, handing her the garbage bag.

She nods and chucks the film cannister into it. As Ariadne ties up the top of the bag, she orders Arthur, “Text when you’re settled.” She looks at Eames, eyes level, and finally smiles, a sly bitter little thing he’d never have imagined on her face when he first met her eighteen months ago. “Take care.”

“Best luck,” Eames says lightly, instinctively; that’s the rapport that they’ve developed topside, that he falls into, despite having decades of Limbo scattering in his head. Ariadne has a contingency plan, his topside job-brain knows that, and he doesn’t know the details because she didn’t give them, like a good dream thief developing a healthy sense of paranoia.

Ariadne grabs Arthur in a hug that looks like it must hurt. She mutters something inaudible, and Arthur’s face drops even further into blankness before he murmurs back, “Got it.”

“We did,” she says, punches him in the arm, grabs her zip hoodie from the closet, and leaves the suite. She’s halfway into the sweatshirt as she heads out the door and gets the rest of it on once she’s turned toward the elevator bank. The transformation is immediate, from some sort of businessperson to tired grad student.

In another minute the PASIV is ready and Eames and Arthur are in the service elevator at the other end of the hallway outside the suite. Four flights down, they leave through the back exit, ambling, talking through a stock boring-chatter conversation; this one’s about the weather and Eames’s abysmal golf game, and he could recite his part in his sleep. Or, apparently, while floundering in a miasma of _memory_, which is what he’s doing; he had a million of these nothing-dialogs in Limbo, with various parties. Not a one of them more than a figment of his imagination—

They get into the blue Volvo and leave the back lot at a perfectly reasonable clip, Arthur’s lead foot saved for later. They’re still talking, the PASIV device behind Eames’s calves in the passenger-side footwell.

The entire bloody time he’s waiting for his head to explode. He’s still—his gut feelings are fighting each other, threat versus guilt versus unquestioned trust versus the new question of the variable Arthur had to go and introduce _yesterday_, which is registering somewhere between tension and irritation. He manages, somehow, to keep up a mindless ramble as nausea stirs in his stomach, until Arthur interrupts, “Subtle,” and nods across the median at four black SUVs heading toward the Hilton at speed.

“Charming,” murmurs Eames, and then he finds he can’t say anything else, because now he’s remembering every car he ever clocked as a threat down in not-Mombasa, all of them at once, makes and models and what tipped him off and what the game was and how he responded, _all _of it, _all of it_, _immediately_.

Memory as the breaking of a dam, continuously.

He catches Arthur’s sideways glance and swallows before he tries to arrange his face into something pleasant. He gives up after ten seconds. The clock on the dash says it’s half four, which suggests he was under for a little less than two hours.

Jesus. Their compound was a twenty-to-one, but Limbo fucks up all the conversions even if Eames could do arithmetic for shit in his head.

But he remembers, oh, he remembers, that the Cobbs were only out for as long as their children’s afternoon naps.

A few miles down the road, Arthur pulls over and swaps the Volvo’s plates. When he gets back into the driver’s seat, he doesn’t speak, merely resumes driving.

Half an hour past the _Maryland Welcomes You! _signs, Arthur takes an exit, parks at a rest stop, and pulls their travel bags out of the boot. Trunk. Whatever it’s called. When he passes the duffel to Eames, their hands brush; Eames is annoyed, _so _annoyed, because before yesterday he would never have noticed, and now the touch zaps right to his chest and flutters there, useless, aside from exacerbating the nausea.

In the lavatory, Eames puts the PASIV case in the duffel and changes clothes—that’s been the plan, going from two men in business wear to a couple of college alumni. The sweatshirt he has is blindingly orange, which is baffling; that kind of thing would have gotten eyes glued to him in the city—

—the city that wasn’t real, the one in his head. In reality, the color is a sure bet for making onlookers remember him wrongly. They’ll think of the bloke in the eyesore of a Cavaliers hoodie, not the fellow who looked like he was headed to an intensely boring conference about marketing or some shite.

And yet his hands are shaking as he fucks up his hair with his fingers and styling paste. He swallows and grinds his teeth, his stomach churning; he hasn’t time to be sick now.

Arthur is out by the vending machines, head turned away. He looks odd in a navy quarter-zip pullover, his hair loose and curling, but it’s undeniably Arthur. Not ideal; an open space, no corridors or utility closets in sight, and there are families in the lobby. Eames can get him back to the car, take him out there, then—

_No_. No, no, fuck, no. He stops, leaning one hand against the cinderblock wall, vertigo rocking him to the soles of his feet. _Topside._ He hasn’t considered Arthur a potential threat since their fourth job together, five years ago. Arthur has never _been_ a threat. He has been meticulous, detail-oriented, a pain in the ass, annoyingly cryptic in his straightforwardness, slyly funny, quick on his feet. He has _never_ been a threat—

“Hey,” says Arthur, and Eames looks up to see him approaching at a relaxed amble. “Glad you made it, man.” He talks like he’s greeting a friend for a long weekend’s vacation—which is what the fucking story is, Eames reminds himself—but worry flashes across his face as he asks, “You good?”

It’s like a sack dropping over his head.

An alley, hot with sunshine, brick dust in his nose and smeared on green canvas, hands and feet numb and senses dull with shock, only brightness and contrast and the damned dust, _I shot you, I shot you_ chasing itself through his head. His gut is in free-fall, here in this pocket of—

Eames blinks, hard, and Arthur’s face has gone masklike again. He has his mouth open by the time Eames shakes the flashback, and to avoid him speaking Eames laughs tiredly—that’s not an act—and pulls out his American-nowhere accent to say, “Zoning out, sorry. Long way.” Which isn’t a lie, even.

“I hear you,” Arthur replies. It sounds casual; he almost looks casual, but for the tightness of his mouth. “We got like twenty minutes to the place, all right?”

“I’m _sick_ of fucking traffic.” And they’re back in it, the roles. The script is just as predictable, and Eames rolls with it as he shoves down on his own panic, reminds himself over and over _safe, safe, safe, topside, safe_. Arthur leads the way to a green Honda and throws his bag in the backseat. Eames’s duffel follows. When he flings himself into the passenger seat, Eames digs his fingers into his own thigh, hard. The pain pins him into place, sort of, or he hopes it will, but really it just creates a fulcrum, a center that holds as his head and stomach swim.

***

It’s more than twenty minutes to the vacation rental, but that’s as expected; why risk giving real information aloud? The house is charming, he supposes. The main thing is that it’s got good lines of sight.

Rather, the main thing when he’d booked it under College Bloke’s ID had been the lines of sight. The memory feels like remembering a movie scene, something he only observed, and Eames— Right now, he can’t be arsed about lines of bloody sight.

He and Arthur sweep the place, but his head is spinning just as badly as his stomach now, loops of memory unraveling into threads, reality and the dream and Limbo, crime rings and mob deals and plaster dust and staring down gun barrels and hotel carpets and the knives and—

“Gotta do a grocery run,” Arthur says once they reconvene in the kitchen, and Eames looks at him and sees his jaw blasted off. “Or we could—”

“Terribly sorry,” Eames interrupts, and gets to the sink just before he vomits.

“Jesus, are—”

“I am _not_ all right,” he says raggedly, voice echoing off the stainless steel, and spits. “I am remembering everything to do with decades of Limbo—” His vocal control is fraying, pitch leaping, vowels going lopsided, words coming too fast. “—and everything to do with the job and everything I didn’t think about _during_ the decades of Limbo and you know it’s not linear, right? Memory’s not.” Eames wrenches at the tap and drinks straight from the faucet, spits again, starts washing his own sick down the drain. “Flashes and bits and it’s all at once,” he finds himself saying, over the rush of water, “and I’m going bloody—"

A hand lands on his shoulder and he rips himself away and rounds on Arthur, snarling, “Don’t _fucking_ touch me.” Arthur stands frozen, hand in midair, eyes wide.

Last night, just last night, he’d laid those hands on either side of Eames’s face and kissed him like he was fighting for it, and between then and now, he’s been an unknown quantity, a traitor, an _enemy_, a key— “Don’t—fuck. _Fuck_. _Why_ did you keep coming back?” Before Arthur can even begin to answer, Eames whirls back around, shuts the tap, and leans over the sink, pressing his hands to his face. Pain lances through his head, temple to temple. His fingers are wet, and he’s shaking again, he notes distantly.

He was shaking like this after that gang leader had cut off each of his fingers, before the knife had moved to his ribs.

He cannot count the number of times he died in Limbo. “Why did I die,” he demands of the colors behind his eyelids. “Why did I die and not wake? Because it was projections,” he answers himself, as it dawns on him; Arthur shifts his weight behind him, a rustle of cloth, and Eames rattles on to cut off whatever he might say. “It was my mind spinning a life for me, and my mind killing me for—for plot reasons, and—I used to dream my own death,” he says, this time directed to Arthur. “Much more often than typical, it seemed, based on— When I remembered natural dreams I’d die and restart in them, like a video game. There were—there were bloody _save_ points.”

There’s a pause, and then Arthur says cautiously, “When you died in Limbo?”

“Woke up,” Eames replies. “But in there.” He woke up in the city—_the city_, a Mombasa that was all wrong—in a half-familiar flat, and told himself the fuzzy blankness of his own memory _in_ Limbo was a sign he needed a change. So he uprooted himself and moved somewhere in that endless, familiar, never-was city, took a new name that wasn’t his and made new contacts that weren’t real and got back into schemes he bested until he didn’t, and then the same thing happened all over again. And again, and again and _again_, and he never bloody noticed.

Why would he have?

In between, he cannot count the number of crimes he committed, because they’re all there at once, every theft, grift, murder. Every victim, bystander, mark, target. Bullets to the brain, to the heart; knives to the throat and gut; his own hands around necks. Strangles, breakages, shattering skulls against anything available. _All at once_, and he—

He killed Arthur four times. Disembowelment, poison, slit throat, bullets. Five, including the count-to-three twin headshots. _Five_ of them, and he’s standing behind Eames now in a kitchen in a rented vacation cottage in bloody Maryland, and they’ve worked half a dozen jobs together since Fischer, and this was the first to go wrong, and Arthur—_Arthur _had let the mark shoot him, down on the third level. Arthur had _failed_, and Eames had died for it, and then continued dying, over and over and over. Dying and lying and bribing and stealing and murdering the one who’d come back for him—

He turns, braces himself against the counter, and repeats, hoarse, “Why did you keep coming back?”

Arthur blinks and says, “You were still there,” as if it’s that simple.

On some level he recognizes that it _is _that simple, that that’s what a teammate does, but— Eames stares down at the floor. “And the sniper rifle wouldn’t work,” he says, aiming for amusement and landing square in bitterness.

Arthur sighs like the breath is being yanked up from the soles of his feet. “When I shot out—you stayed under. We figured it out,” he says. Eames glances up; Arthur has never looked less pleased with new understanding. “Ariadne and me. It’s—Limbo isn’t a _dream_, or a level of one. It’s the subconscious.”

“Raw, infinite, nothing’s down there, blah blah—”

“No, there _is_ stuff there,” Arthur says, eyes on Eames. “We had the theory wrong, because we were working off what Dom said. Dom _meant _to go there. He and Mal.” The twist of Arthur’s mouth is too familiar, even three years after Mal, and Eames hates it, wants to erase it—and the image of Arthur staring at him, jawless, flashes before his mind’s eye again. He takes in a gasp of a breath; Arthur doesn’t notice. “They wanted to find a blank slate where they could do whatever. Like Ariadne said. So they did. You didn’t have a goal. _You _dropped into your subconscious, without warning, and your subconscious is—”

“—a big fuck-off city of criminals. And I couldn’t just—” He stops, because he runs out of words.

The nod Arthur gives him is tight. “Yeah. You don’t—you _can’t_ come topside unless you know you’re there, because it’s your own head—you wouldn’t come to think it wasn’t reality on your own. Or if there’s an intervening dream level, you can come up, because that’s kind of between states, right? So—on the Fischer job, right. Fischer dropped to Limbo, but Dom expected it to be _his_ Limbo, so it was. It’s—suggestible, and collective. He didn’t _know_ he was in Limbo, but when Ariadne killed him down there, your level was waiting for him.”

It’s almost welcome, the visual memory of Fischer flailing about on the floor of the fortress like a fish out of water, muffled in snow gear.

“So I didn’t know, and there wasn’t anything to catch me,” Eames finishes. Which implies that, if he’d been bloody thinking about it, if they’d _properly_ assessed the risks, he’d have considered Limbo as an option, not just relied on Arthur. If he’d considered Limbo, it wouldn’t have convinced him.

In that way, the decades he spent there are his own fault. And Arthur’s, for letting him fall.

The realization knocks the ground out from under him. His hands are shaking again, and he stretches his fingers at his sides, turns his head to look out the back window. There’s stability of a sort in anger, in the cool detachment with which he says, “And you didn’t work that out until you’d offed me three times. Were they good shots, at least?” He waves one hand, dismissing his own question. “Of course they were; it’s you. Well, that makes me easier about the serial killing.”

When he glances back at Arthur, the anguish there, the set of his mouth—

Considering what Eames did to him, it’s not to be borne.

So Eames doesn’t. He pivots back to the sink, thinking of bullets and blood and the harmattan and envisioning his own head bursting through a rifle’s scope, and then jerks himself away from it. He forces himself to _see _the tiles of the backsplash over the sink, the stovetop. The color of the grout, spots from grease and hard water, the inconsistencies in the edges of each square of ceramic, the variations in the thickness of the glaze. “Come on,” he says, half to the tiles, half to Arthur, “what’s a little homicide between friends?” At the shocked noise Arthur makes, he laughs, hollow. “_Are_ we friends, even? It never felt like—”

“That’s fucked,” Arthur says, flat with fury, and his hand lands on Eames’s shoulder. Eames doesn’t bother shaking it off this time; it might come in useful. “Don’t fucking—it’s not going to fucking _help_ you—”

“_Nothing_ is going to fucking _help_,” he snarls, because the panic and the recall and the strain are all collapsing right down to rage, which is at least fucking actionable. “I’ve got _lifetimes _unfurling up here and it won’t fucking stop.” The next thing to say pops into his head, and it’s close to unforgiveable; they haven’t _been _like this in ages, he and Arthur. But _Eames _hasn’t _been like this _for decades, not that he can fucking remember, and it’s easy as breathing to slip back into that casual cruelty. “No wonder Mal jumped—”

Arthur jerks him around by the shoulder, spitting, “Don’t fucking _dare_—”

For a flash of an instant it’s last night, Arthur’s eyes hot and close. Now, though, Arthur is furious, and it’s exactly the way they used to needle each other until one of them snapped— “Oh, the more things change,” Eames says. It has to be him speaking, because Arthur’s mouth isn’t moving, but he can’t recognize his own voice before the laugh spills out of his throat, a mad-sounding pitchy giggle torn through. At that, Arthur’s eyes widen—fear? A new surge of anger settles him enough to say, twisted and cruel, “Go on. Like old times.”

Instantly Arthur drops his hands. “It’s not old times,” he says, but he’s still in Eames’s face. “This isn’t you.”

And isn’t that adorable.

Eames bites out, cold and precise, “I am just about as me as I can get, actually, because _you_ sent me to marinate in my own mind for a century.”

He doesn’t miss the way Arthur flinches, before he says through his teeth, “Still not hitting you.”

“You want to,” Eames insists, but instead of letting him deny it, letting him _lie_, he ducks and drives his shoulder into Arthur’s chest, hard enough to knock him off-balance. Arthur grabs for him—he’s used to Eames being his _friend_; he thinks Eames will _catch _him—and Eames is happy to disabuse him of the notion, precious as it is. He bulls into him again, kicks at his ankles, throws his full weight against him and lets it take them both to the floor.

The fall punches the air out of Arthur, and whatever’s left leaves him when Eames’s fist lands in his gut. He swings his other fist toward Arthur’s face, but Arthur jerks his head to the side, teeth bared; Eames feels his knuckles split on the tile. Arthur winds one arm around his shoulders in a grip like iron, pulling him too close for a decent follow-up, so Eames chops at his side beneath the ribcage, claws at him, gets a knee under himself for leverage. He’s half-up, dragging Arthur with him, and sneering, “Think you’re too _good_. This isn’t _you_.”

Arthur slams his free hand into the outside of Eames’s leg, just above the knee, and wrenches himself bodily in the same direction as the hit. Between the strike, the torque, and the denim of his jeans on the tiling, Eames falls to the side. He shifts his weight forward, plans to land on his shoulder and go from there—he wants a fucking _fight_, he doesn’t care how—but Arthur has more momentum than anticipated. Eames’s shoulder goes out from under him and he knows his skull is about to crack against the tile—

But it doesn’t, because at the last instant Arthur releases his shoulder and presses his palm to the back of Eames’s head. He stays down low, pinning Eames with his body weight—_how_ is this skinny bastard so heavy—with his other hand clamped around Eames’s wrist and holding it to the floor, his head bent so all Eames can see is his hair falling over his ear. “Not too good,” Arthur grits out, and it takes Eames a moment to realize he’s contradicting him; he jerks, rage rising, because if Arthur’s telling the truth he’d _fucking hit Eames already_. But Arthur just tightens his grasp on his wrist and somehow makes himself heavier. He’s out of breath, but he sucks in air and sighs out, _bored_, “You’re just predictable, Mr. Eames.”

The honorific cuts through the shit in Eames’s head like a machete.

“Fuck you,” Eames says, but it’s weak, because he—it’s Arthur, being fucking _Arthur_.

Arthur scoffs. It’s the sound he makes when he wants Eames, unable to make eye contact for whatever reason, to know that he’s rolling his eyes, and it—immediately, it overrides everything, _everything_ he’s carried up from Limbo.

This is Arthur, his co-conspirator, his—Arthur, holding him down, even as he cushions his head. The best point he’s ever worked with; the _only_ point he’ll work with, since Fischer. Arthur, thorough and exacting and ruthless, who stormed Limbo and came back, over and over, because Eames hadn’t surfaced yet. Arthur, who’s fucking _laughing_ at him now with his affected boredom, whose grasp on his wrist is unyielding but not painful, who—fuck, who he kissed sixteen hours ago, after _years_ of holding him at a distance, all his competence and control and pragmaticism and his odd stealth humor. Arthur, brave or stubborn or both, enough to look at Eames’s careful arms’-length detachment and decide he was done with it.

There are lifetimes in his head, but there’s a real lifetime in his bones that didn’t start, somehow, until the dance with this merciless, merciful dream criminal began.

Eames exhales, relaxes.

“You done?” says Arthur, low; it buzzes in Eames’s ribcage, and he feels something bright and shivery bloom there.

“I might be going mad,” Eames replies, and lets his eyes close.

“We’d have figured that out before we left the hotel, if you were.” Arthur is matter-of-fact. “You have a personality hangover.”

He nearly laughs. “Might be accurate. Down there, I’d—it felt like I’d known of you and Cobb for about a year. We had done a few jobs.” He swallows. “Had a couple fights.”

Arthur is quiet for a moment, before he says, contemplative, “You were pretty awful then.”

“As if you were such a prize.”

“Yeah, but you picked the fights.”

As he just has. Eames winces. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” says Arthur peaceably, and that’s it; he’s moved on. “Can I move?”

“You’re safe to. I’m—I’ve no interest in a repeat.” He can’t say how long that’ll hold, but for the moment, Limbo seems manageable. It’s retreated, with Arthur’s weight holding him here and now.

“Okay,” says Arthur again, and shifts the hand beneath Eames’s head, spreads his fingers and closes them against Eames’s scalp. The motion is minuscule, and yet it shoots a bolt of something to the shivery brightness in Eames’s chest. “My fucking timing,” Arthur says, apparently out of nowhere, mild disgust in his tone. “Get the guts for it yesterday and then send you—” He breaks off. “_I’m_ sorry,” he says, finally, quietly.

“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” Eames says, as if he doesn’t feel like he’s lighting up from the inside. “Some mixed signals. Although it’s downright rude I’ve kissed you twice as often dreaming as awake.”

“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” echoes Arthur. He’s smiling. Eames can _feel_ that he’s smiling; his face is nearly tucked against Eames’s own neck. “But—”

“I’ve got to brush my teeth,” Eames says—his mouth tastes like sick—and then remembers. “And we’ve got to get groceries, you said.”

“Right,” says Arthur, but for a moment he lies still, his breath quiet and his fingers in Eames’s hair. “Couldn’t have done this somewhere with carpet, of course.”

Clearly unfair. “You’re the one keeping us here. And I’m the one actually on the floor.”

“Only because you picked the fight,” Arthur points out, and says again, “Predictable, Mr. Eames,” before he finally gets to his feet, and holds out a hand.

***

Eames watches their perimeter after Arthur leaves, moving about the single floor of the house with his phone in one hand and his gun under the other. He won’t take it out of its holster, doesn’t quite trust himself to, because—he _is_ here, and topside, and safe, but he drifts. Unless his focus is completely captured, he finds himself thinking in the back of his head of contacts in the smuggling ring. Starts wondering whether he should expect Arthur back at all, starts plotting routes to the nearest airport to get himself back home in the city—

It’s like realizing he’s standing at the edge of a cliff each time, his legs going to jelly. The place in his head has no equivalent on this earth.

So, focus, he thinks. The job. Since it was a bust, they’ve only got fifty per cent of their negotiated payout. Ariadne confirms that everyone is gone to ground, no incidents. About as well as it could have worked out, if it was going to fall apart. He and Arthur spent hours last night talking contingencies and risks. Certainly, they’d missed the biggest one that actually _happened_, but—well, bygones, he supposes.

He recalls now the odd sort of tension between them, after the rest of the team had left. Not that it affected their behavior; they argued and joked and scribbled on each other’s notes, all just as usual. Arthur was dressed for business: an evergreen button-down shirt, khaki slacks, brown spectator shoes. By ten, his hair was curling at the ends and his shirt was open to the third button. Which Eames _knew_, because—Arthur looked like he always did, but Eames couldn’t _stop looking_, not for any appreciable length of time.

Finally, finally, near two, Arthur threw down his notebook and pen and said he was done. Eames played it like usual, like he’d just been humoring him, letting him work out his pre-job nerves, and Arthur glowered like usual, but there was a singing electric edge to it. Eames felt charged, sparks along his spine. If it were bloody _anyone_ else, he’d have a knife out; that kind of energy was never safe.

But it was Arthur, in which case it might only be a danger _because _it was Arthur, and because it was Arthur and Eames himself—

They got up at the same time, finished packing their things away at the same time, arrived at the door at the same time. Eames cast about for something to say other than “goodnight,” and Arthur watched him for a moment and muttered, “Fuck it,” and closed the eighteen inches between them in an instant, catching Eames’s open mouth and bracing his hands against the wall.

Eames was thrown off-balance, physically and existentially, but he knew enough, wanted enough, to get his hands on Arthur’s hips and push right into the kiss. Arthur pressed forward and dropped his hands to Eames’s face, cradling his jaw in his palms, thumb sweeping over his cheekbone. He felt molten, fire below his ribcage, Arthur heavy against his chest and tonguing along Eames’s teeth. When Eames bit, Arthur half-hummed; when Eames shifted his weight, Arthur got a leg between Eames’s, and—

“_Fuck_,” Eames said, involuntary, against Arthur’s mouth, and Arthur only made that noise again, barely audible, and Eames had to grab for his wrists, press himself harder to the wall, forcing space between them. He didn’t _want_ to, not the animal part of his mind and body, but there was a bloody job _tomorrow_, and this wasn’t the bloody time. “Damn it all—”

“Christ,” said Arthur, which was encouraging, if unhelpful. “_Christ_, I fucking—”

“—we need a full night’s sleep.”

Arthur drew back, his wrists still in Eames’s hands. “But if we didn’t—”

“Can’t _if_,” said Eames, and half-laughed. “Can’t think about _if_.”

“Don’t think about elephants,” Arthur rattled off in a whisper, as if to himself.

Not the time to ask what on earth that was about. “Table—this. _God_.”

“After the job.”

And Eames had agreed, saying, “Yes. After,” and committed the look on Arthur’s face—intent, nearly angry, a bit wild—to memory, every line of it.

Eames realizes he’s done two circuits of the house without thinking once of the city.

Well, that’s pleasant.

He can’t—well, more honestly, he never has been able to say he hasn’t thought of it, of Arthur, of what he’d be like, but—well, separating business and pleasure is especially important when your business is highly illegal. The thinking was limited to hypotheticals and a little wanking when absolutely necessary, but that wasn’t often; Eames has been used to adapting his wishes to suit realistic expectations. Arthur had never been a realistic expectation, merely an extraordinarily attractive pipedream.

That had, he thought, shifted on the Fischer job. On _that _fucking job, with Cobb hanging onto his sanity by a raveling thread, Ariadne a wide-eyed liability (although she’d been anything but, when it came down to it), Yusuf puttering along in unshakeable cheer, Saito inscrutably watching their every move like a great bloody bird of prey—and with all that, Arthur had started _flirting_, hidden under heaps of his sly, dry humor. Compliments clad in superiority and cynicism. Eames took each at face value, for plausible deniability and the way Arthur watched him after, eyes barely narrowed. It might have been a pressure release for Arthur, just that, until, on their way to the Sydney first-class lounge, Eames had said in an undertone, “If this goes wrong, probably won’t be seeing you.”

Arthur had thrown him a look absolutely dripping disgust and replied, scathing, “Underestimation is bad practice, Mr. Eames.”

He _did not_ miss a step; his heart _did not_ skip a beat; he only raised his eyebrows and said lightly, “Let’s not have it go wrong, then.”

And there have been jobs since Fischer, half a dozen, all together. Arthur kept up his stealth compliments; Eames kept him at arms’ length. Until fucking yesterday.

And now, having been alone in his own head for a bloody century—sure, surrounded by imagined people, but they were all just _him_, in different incarnations, until they were Arthur—he is _finished_ with arms’ length.

It’s a sudden change, and Eames considers it from all available angles; he’s not a one for sudden changes, particularly regarding principles like _don’t fuck your colleagues_. Could be influenced by circumstances, he thinks. Last night, he’d been concerned about the short term, defusing the tension between them, but that had happened as soon as Arthur was reminded that they had the bloody job to do. Rather, the tension had been buttoned away and that was that.

Now—well.

He’d suspect himself of confusing gratitude for a personal connection—Arthur had dragged him out of Limbo, after all—but he knows what gratitude feels like. And he knows what _expressing_ gratitude as a series of favors feels like, and none of it is remotely what he wants here and now. How can one get more personal than five—six years of success as business partners, four of those as nearly friends? Knowing someone has your back, knowing you have theirs—that’s not to be sneezed at.

Would a _deepened _personal connection jeopardize that trust? Eames dismisses the idea almost immediately. Not with them, he thinks. Not with Arthur flirting for the last eighteen months. If Arthur were the type to allow dissatisfaction to affect how he ran a job, he’d never have worked with Eames again. And vice versa; Eames had thought, after Fischer, for about five seconds of finding a new point, to avoid complications, but—no, absolutely not.

_Is _it short-term, what he wants? He thinks not. He wants—oh, he _wants_, and answering exactly what he wants might be beyond his own capacity.

He wants Arthur.

It seems, to the best of his understanding, that Arthur wants him.

The solution seems rather apparent.

Eames has just settled on this when he sees the green Honda pulling up the drive. He stops circling, stands and watches out the sidelight as Arthur lifts two canvas sacks from the trunk and carries them toward the door, and then catches himself. Eames flips the deadbolt and undoes the chain and pulls the door open; Arthur glances up, in the middle of sorting through his keyring, and doesn’t quite smile, but he nods to Eames. “Good?”

“All good.”

Arthur starts preparing dinner as Eames puts the groceries away. Pasta, heaps of it, and fresh vegetables, some barely steamed and others just chopped up as-is. Salt, pepper, olive oil. It’s ready in fifteen minutes and they each inhale a plate, Eames extremely aware at his first bite that he’s barely eaten properly since he flew into New Jersey yesterday.

It’s not as if New Jersey is exactly a state compatible with appetite.

Some of the groceries had been alcohol—a six-pack, a fifth of whiskey, a bottle of cheap red—but neither drinks anything but water. The mishaps with Somnacin and nervous-system depressants are mostly sorted, but Eames learned by experience that alcohol only put off meaningful sleep, the kind where your brain actually rests and sorts what’s happened to it. Which is what he needs about a week of, or at least it felt like that until about forty minutes ago, and—

—and—hm. To test the waters, Eames kicks gently forward with one foot, taps the toe of Arthur’s trainer with his. Arthur looks at him sideways, sets his fork on his plate, and crosses his ankle behind Eames’s, and then raises one eyebrow.

Well.

“You had the guts for it yesterday,” Eames says, the first words either has spoken since they sat down, and settles his elbows on the table. The kitchen table could easily seat six, but they’re in one corner of it, backs to the wall. Like proper criminals.

Arthur doesn’t blink, doesn’t move, only says, “I did.”

“Now?”

He half-smiles. “Still got them.” His eyes are on Eames, steady and warm, crinkled at the corners.

Eames doesn’t bother smiling back. He lifts one hand, settles it on the back of Arthur’s neck, and leans until he’s well in Arthur’s space. He moves his thumb, sweeps it beneath Arthur’s ear, and watches the minute flutter of Arthur’s lashes, watches his shoulders settle, watches Arthur focus again on him, quiet and intent. _Patient_. Eames has watched Arthur wait in utter stillness for thirty minutes of dreamtime to make a single perfect shot.

If it were five years ago, Eames would drop a line now, some crass double entendre. But it isn’t, so he doesn’t. He just closes his own eyes and, gently, carefully, touches his mouth to Arthur’s. Arthur draws a soft breath through his nose; he doesn’t make any move to deepen the kiss, only presses back, just as gentle.

Eames draws back by a bare centimeter. On what’s left of his breath, he sighs, “Well, hell.”

“You’re even now,” Arthur says, barely audible. “Topside and—”

“Fuck _even_. I—Christ, I want—” Eames takes a deep breath and leans back in his seat, drops his hand—but Arthur grabs it in his own, before Eames can move away completely, and interlaces their fingers.

A small thing, but— it’s Arthur, who moves only with total surety, and who says now, calm and casual, as if they’re any other words, “You want?”

“I want,” echoes Eames, and shakes himself away from the feeling of Arthur’s thumb stroking the back of his hand, one sweep, calluses catching. Distance in analysis, the thing he’s _good_ at. “I want to be absolutely certain I’m not doing some ghastly Limbo-rebound _thing_. Because—” Oh, fuck detachment, he decides, and fixes his gaze on Arthur’s. “I do _not_ want to wonder. Either of us to. If it’d be different if the job had come off.”

Arthur’s eyebrows quirk. “I seem that insecure, Mr. Eames?”

“_I_ seem that inconsistent,” Eames corrects. “To myself. _I _wouldn’t trust me, until I’ve—settled.”

“I’ve trusted you since you didn’t knife me that first fight,” says Arthur plainly, as if he’s not just mentioned an incident from six _years_ ago. “You had four on you. If you’d _really_ wanted me out—”

“I killed you five times today,” Eames snaps, and drops his free hand over his eyes. “I’m—” His voice catches in his throat and he realizes he’s no idea what to say anyway, no idea what he _is_, other than—terrified, quietly, of getting it wrong now. Of the ghosts in his head, the feeling of skin splitting under a blade, the way a man’s face contorts as the poison hits.

There’s silence, he doesn’t know for how long, before Arthur says, quiet, “Hey.” He ghosts his thumb over the back of Eames’s hand again; it feels like it’s trailing fire. “It’s fine—I mean, it was shit. But it’s fine now, with me. And you want to hold off. So we hold off.”

As if it’s that easy.

It probably is.

Eames doesn’t move, doesn’t look, but Arthur tightens his grip on Eames’s fingers the least bit and then sets his hand on the table like it’s something precious. “I got the dishes,” he says lightly. “Then the cameras.” He lifts the plates, silverware clinking against the ceramic, and his trainers track across the kitchen.

The sink turns on, and the rush of water, the click of plates sends the ghosts away again, makes space again in Eames’s mind. More soft clicks as each dish lands in the drying rack—plates, then forks, then the tearing of plastic wrap to cover the rest of the pasta. The opening and closing of the fridge door, squealing on its hinge. Arthur mutters, “Yeah, shut up,” to it, and then his footsteps start again, out of the kitchen and into the second bedroom. There’s the sound of zips, and a series of soft thuds as whatever Arthur’s messing with land on his bed.

Eames shakes himself and stands, looks around the kitchen. The tabletop varnish is chipped, the tile coloration irregular. His mouth tastes of salt and fresh tomato; he smells lemon dish soap. His back hurts, and his head.

He is topside, and safe.

Tiredness hits him like a sledgehammer.

He meets Arthur in the hallway; he’s carrying a cardboard box, with coils of cable looped around his arm. Eames has—no idea what to say. He pauses, hand on the door to his own room.

“We’re okay,” Arthur says, casual, but when Eames lifts his gaze from the floor, Arthur’s eyes are soft, the crinkles just showing at the corners. “All right?”

Eames swallows and nods. Arthur nods back, dimple flashing, and continues on to the front room.

In his room, Eames gets his shoes off and gives up the rest as a bad job. It’s barely eight, the sky not quite dark yet, and his limbs feel like lead. The quilt on the bed smells like bleach and the pillows are crackly and too soft, but Arthur is muttering to himself, just audible through the walls, and Eames has lived bloody eons today, as far as his conscious mind is concerned, so—

***

—when he blinks and finds two hours have passed, he isn’t terribly surprised. The house is quiet, true night outside the window, but a ray of yellow shines in from beneath his door. Eames sits up and rubs at his hair, yanks off the dreadfully orange sweatshirt—he tries never to sleep in them, especially not the ones with hoods, but a little drawstring strangulation must fall into every nap born of desperation—and stands. He feels all right. Perhaps thirsty. Not too awake; he could sleep again, if he were good about it. Which is to say that if he got his jeans off and brushed his teeth and went right back to bed, under the covers this time, he’d probably pass out again.

But Arthur’s awake—he doesn’t leave lights on, does Arthur—so he might as well see what that’s about.

Eames steps out of his room in sock feet and wanders to the front room, which is just the open space across from the kitchen. Arthur is at one end of the sofa, barefoot, in sweats and a crap t-shirt. There’s a paperback laid on its face over the sofa arm and his laptop on his knees. He looks up at Eames, raises his eyebrows in a question.

“Slept a bit,” Eames says; his voice is a little gravelly.

“You have pillow creases,” says Arthur, gesturing to his own cheek.

“And you’re mutilating books,” Eames replies, and rescues the paperback. A thousand-page fantasy thing, heavy on the swords and light on the sorcery; Arthur goes through them like packets of crisps. “How are things?”

Arthur shrugs; his eyebrows are still up, a slight smile pulling at his mouth as he watches Eames fish for something to mark his page. “Quiet. For everyone.” The rest of the team.

Eames finds a receipt in the pocket of his jeans and sticks it into the book, then places it on the end table where its spine won’t crack. “You could get a rest.” He glances at Arthur.

He’s still smiling, but it’s gone sort of wistful. “Could. Weird day.”

Eames gets to his other side and sprawls at the opposite end of the sofa. Arthur’s hair is doing stupid things. It’s terribly endearing, Eames thinks, but he doesn’t like the dark smudges beneath his eyes. “Suppose it must have been.”

It’s the wrong words, or the wrong tone, because Arthur looks up as if stung, and then back at his laptop before he mumbles, “Nothing to yours—”

“No, please, didn’t mean—that. I’d rather not fuss over who’s had the odder afternoon.” He considers for a moment, Arthur jumping from topside to Limbo, something like eight or nine times. The city—wherever in the city Eames was—and the hotel suite with Ariadne, and the job going to pieces, in flashes. That’d be a mess. “I think you might win for logistics alone. But it’s not a competition. Look, just—I’m going to fuck it up if I talk.” Arthur looks up at him again, holds his gaze, and Eames says, carefully, “Would—if the work isn’t too important—could we just—”

All the care in the world won’t help his bloody vocabulary. He gives up.

Arthur watches him for another moment, and then closes his laptop and puts it on the end table, moving his book out of the way and stacking it on top. His motions are precise as always. “Hopeless,” he mutters, and then he’s right next to Eames on the sofa, his legs flung over Eames’s lap and his temple against Eames’s forehead. “Okay?”

Eames would hate him, but he’s too grateful. Arthur is warm, smelling of cotton and salt, solid and undemanding, and he’ll—be here, Eames knows it as well as he knows his own name. He curls one arm around Arthur’s shoulders, settles back against the sofa cushion, and presses his nose against Arthur’s cheek. “Better than,” he says. “It’s—it’s going to be okay, isn’t it?”

“Yup,” says Arthur, and drops a kiss on his forehead. “Better than.”

**Author's Note:**

> for unknown reasons this kicked my ass. this Eames isn't a typical fanon characterization, and I LOVE him, but getting his mental tone right required WORK. still satisfied with how this kind-of duology worked out.
> 
> I live for comments; thank you for reading!


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